Friday is finally here! Our community project for today: pick your poison BWF…wear a perfume with tuberose, gardenia or both.
What fragrance did you pick? As always, do chime in with your scent of the day even if you’re not participating in the community project.
I’m in Tauerville Tuberose Flash…
I could keep this alive as long as cut flowers, right? Brussel's Bonsai 8-inch White Gardenia in Clay Pot: "Your small 4 year old bonsai will arrive at 6-inch to 8-inch tall in a 6-inch container and will perform best outdoors." $35 at Lowes. Harry & David has a nicer looking one (in the image, anyway) for $69.99, or there are two sizes at Bonsai Boy ($49.99 - $69.95).
Could 2017 be the year of the deconstructed tuberose? With Twilly d’Hermès, Naomi Goodsir Nuit de Bakélite, and, now, Amouage Figment Woman, I wonder.1
Perfumers Dorothée Piot and Karine Vinchon-Spehner developed Figment Woman. Its notes include Sichuan pepper, saffron, gardenia, tuberose, jasmine sambac, orange blossom, lisylang (a fractionated ylang ylang), cassia, orris, papyrus, patchouli and incense. Here’s Kevin’s review of this one’s partner, Amouage Figment Man…
Most people, when the weather gets warmer, revert to something cologne-like or citrussy for a scent. My question is, why? If you're going to eat seasonal, you may as well "scent" seasonal too, and if you like your perfumes flowery, as I do, there is an embarrassment of options - from jasmine to rose to sweet pea. But none are quite so perfect to wear in the hot weather as the gardenia.
— Read more at Gardenia's World at Vogue UK.
Some time ago, the indie brand Strange Invisible Perfumes had a Lady Day fragrance.1 It was, as you’d expect, a gardenia (Billie Holiday, aka Lady Day, was known for wearing gardenias in her hair onstage2), and it was, as you’d perhaps also expect, big, as in a BWF (big white floral). It wasn’t dark, really, or melancholy, just big and lush, and it also wasn’t the oddball take on Lady Day that you find in Serge Lutens Une Voix Noire, which Kevin found more Gaga than Holiday.3
Italian perfumer Maria Candida Gentile takes an entirely different approach, and if I can’t really connect the smell with what I know of Billie Holiday, that’s neither here nor there I suppose, and we’re always happy to have an excuse to post another image: she is shown here with The First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald…